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All aboard!
In an ideal world, your product is so intuitive that every single customer and user could pick up your product and immediately start using it without any help. This is not an ideal world. So, we need to find ways to assist folks who need a little help getting started with our product without getting in the way of those who don’t. Falling on either side of that razor’s edge can seriously hamper first impressions of your product. (Clippy, we’re looking at you).
Meanwhile, in product news, there are tools to help you build your onboarding, AI can read the manual for you, maybe we need one app to rule them all, and that one app may be SQL.
10 User onboarding behavioral principles and dark patterns you need to know. How often do you ask yourself: “What do our users need or care about?”. Kate Syuma keeps it simple: “What is good for the user is good for business.” Kate started reminding herself more often about this thesis when thinking about the onboarding advice she gives to companies, course materials she creates, or practices she shares.
Digital onboarding: How to make it work for you. Digital is in. Digital onboarding is one of many processes companies adopt to keep up with the new online business environment. Research shows that companies that offer digital onboarding see a 50-60% increase in conversion compared to traditional onboarding. Consumers desire the ability to interact with businesses digitally — whether it's shopping online or completing onboarding from home. Alana Chinn explains how you can provide a seamless digital onboarding experience for your customers.
Product onboarding ultimate guide: Steps, examples & tips. Done right, product onboarding can do wonders for your SaaS company. It helps: improve user activation and retention, reduce customer acquisition costs, prevent user disengagement, improve customer loyalty, and reduce customer abandonment and burnout. Hannah Clark explains how to get user onboarding right, plus her favorite tools for getting your users settled in and ready to rock.
Behind the Product: ONCE. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson recently started ONCE, an initiative that offers software products users can buy once and own forever. They envisioned a model where the code was transparent, allowing users to host it themselves, free from recurring fees and external control constraints. Here are the highlights from Mike Belsito’s conversation with Jason Fired about launching ONCE and its family of products.
15 Best examples of customer onboarding videos. When time is money, no one wants to spend hours reading thousands of words on a page to learn how to use a single product feature, and expecting your customers to do it is like waiting for pigs to fly. That's why the folks at Synthesia gathered 15 inspirational examples of the best customer onboarding videos - some of which you can even replicate yourself.
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This week on Rocketship.fm:
Mastering stakeholder management as a product manager /
product leader
In this episode, host Mike Belsito sits down with Bruce McCarthy and Melissa Appel, co-authors of "Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders." The three discuss the often challenging world of stakeholder management, offering practical advice for product managers and leaders looking to navigate complex organizational dynamics — covering topics such as understanding organizational structures, building rapport with stakeholders, and managing roadmap changes.
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One Unified API to add hundreds of customer-facing integrations to your product |
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Should onboarding be owned by the CMO or CPO?
As product leaders, we know how incredibly important onboarding can be. But who should really own it? I recently came across this Fast Company article that made the case for the CMO to fully own onboarding. There are some valid points made, for sure. But I believe the path forward lies in collaboration, not in siloed ownership.
As we all know, the customer journey doesn't neatly separate into distinct “marketing” and “product” phases. From first touch to power user, each interaction shapes the user's perception and success with our product. This reality requires blending the storytelling prowess of marketing with the functional expertise of product teams. Better together, as they say.
As product people, our challenge is to foster an environment where marketing's brand vision and product's user-centric design team up to create a better onboarding experience for our users. This isn't about ceding control; it's about realizing that our diverse skills can create something greater than the sum of its parts.
Imagine an onboarding process in which marketing's compelling narratives guide users through key features while the product ensures that each step delivers tangible value.
It can work.
But it won’t work without intentional effort. Regular cross-functional workshops, shared OKRs, and integrated teams can help break down traditional silos. As product leaders, we must champion this integration, positioning ourselves not as guardians of territory but as facilitators of cross-functional success.
Let's reframe the conversation from "Who owns onboarding?" to "How can we collectively create the best possible user experience?" By doing so, we'll not only enhance our onboarding processes but also set a new standard for cross-functional collaboration that can benefit all aspects of our product development lifecycle.
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In 42 days, 100s of product people from around the world will gather in Cleveland, Ohio, for INDUSTRY: The Product Conference. Here's the event in numbers:
- 2 day experience (3 days with optional 4hr workshop) allowing you to fully immerse yourself in the world of product.
- 12 keynotes exploring everything from the impact of AI to behavioral science.
- 4 breakout talks by front-line product management experts.
- 10 roundtable discussions with your product peers.
- 2 interactive 1 hour working sessions digging deep into AI and customer research.
- World-class event with a 60+ NPS score year over year.
USE THIS CODE TO SAVE $50 THIS WEEK: ONCE50
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While talking about onboarding, the founders of Flow have explored various ways to create user onboarding flows and have been left wanting more. So they created their own. Flow is a new tool for creating onboarding flows and product tours that offer more flexibility, power, control, and features without a higher price.
Why RTFM when AI can do it for you? Studies show that many of us don’t read the user guide (20% in the UK, 50% in the US). While it may be ok for consumers to skip the occasional user guide, it’s probably not a good idea. To ensure engineers know exactly how the systems they look after work, UK industrial software firm Aveva launched an AI system that can read and learn operating manuals on their behalf. Let’s just hope the AI didn’t hallucinate too much.
“There’s an app for that” was all wrong. The conventional wisdom for B2B SaaS founders is that their software should solve one pain point, gain customers, and add features as their company grows. Parker Conrad, founder and CEO of Rippling, thinks that’s the wrong way. That approach leads businesses to manage 100 different pieces of software to run their business, leading to inefficiency. He suggested using one app to rule them all, like Rippling (or Microsoft Office or your favorite ERP package).
Well, I can spell SQL. If you’ve ever faced the challenge of getting data from a wide range of sources, the folks at Anyquery have your back. This command line interface tool allows you to write SQL queries on any data source. It is a query engine that can query data from different sources, including Google Sheets, Chrome tabs, Spotify libraries, Notion databases, and CSVs by using SQL.
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The ONLY 3 Questions You EVER Need: Decision-Making Made Simple
Wednesday, August 21st @ 01:00 PM EST
We are all plagued by decision fatigue from analysis paralysis, second-guessing, and buyer’s remorse, but there is a better way. Everyone can improve their decision-making speed and confidence by being more outcome-oriented, and I want to make that simple for everyone. By making sure always to ask Where to? (Where do we want to go?), all choices are framed with the destination in mind.
Leveraging this mindset and 2 other key questions, we choose the most valuable and impactful options more often, and over time, we get closer and closer to our desired outcomes.
From this talk, your team will walk about with an easy-to-implement framework they can deploy anywhere and for any decision.
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